publishing

No cyborgs in Kindleland

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So I have had a response from Kindle Singles about The Weight of Reason. No surprise in that it was rejected. I didn’t expect to have it accepted a their work is very high quality and though I believe this is the best piece of work I have ever produced, I was pleased that they even considered it. At least it wasn’t rejected within a matter of hours!

So now I start another adventure where I investigate the precarious world of self-publishing. Do I release it on KDP and similar methods for other book readers? Do I set it to free download for a limited time? Or do I list it on here and believe in the power of the human race in requesting donations and have a link to a PayPal account? What about cover art? Do I purchase a royalty free photograph and manipulate it so it looks vaguely like a scene from the story? Or do I spend a day looking at Deviant Art until I find an artist whose style speaks to me as being suitable for it?

I have many questions to ponder… any advice would be appreciated at this stage!

Unbound Live! – Winchester

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unbound

Tonight I went to my first ever literature event at the Winchester Discovery Centre (event details here)

Though two of the attendees were missing (Tamasin Day-Lewis and Paul Kingsnorth – a shame because I’m intrigued at the sound of his book), it was a fun evening listening to the interesting and wacky offerings from some semi-famous and some not so famous names (the biggest name attendee was Katy Brand) Continue reading →

Voyager publishing calls for unpublished scifi manuscripts

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Do you have a complete manuscript gathering proverbial dust on your hard disk? Is it complete but you have not quite got around to looking for an agent? How about this…

Voyager, the science fiction division of HarperCollins has called for submission of science fiction manuscripts of new authors currently without an agent. This is something they do every so often but perhaps now seeing the meteoric rise of self-publishing and the success of a handful of the self-published, they are opening up to new writers and new works. Continue reading →

Some sales figures to chew over – ebooks

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Carrying on from yesterday’s discussion, on the trends of buying ebooks and the effect it is having on the market, we have some sales figures today from The Grauniad.

Sales of ebooks are increasing and compensating for the decline in physical books. I would assume that this trend is here to stay. Book sales in general – when we combine the sales of physical and digital formats – are down just 2%. There are many aspects that could affect this so any hint that people are starting to read less (as more reactionary newspapers than The Graundian might suggest) could be affected by economic factors. On a side note, I would be interested to know what the equivalent sales figures are for second-hand book sales. If these have increased, it could indicate that the decline in sales of new books is for economic purposes.

Some food for thought anyway.

A view from the other side – epublishing

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In amongst all the doom-mongering of Amazon monopoly and of epublishing in general, there is an alternative view in which the publishing houses are dinosaurs who can – yet refuse – to avoid their own extinction to preserve a monopoly they feel entitled to. Strong stuff, but this is the view of Barry Eisler in this article for The Guardian.

There are some incendiary points in there as well as a completely irrelevant aside about the US Department of Justice’s conduct on political prisoners but this section caught my eye:

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Site of the Week: You Write On

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You Write On is a community of readers and writers that claims, very boldly, to have had a large number of success stories for getting writers published. It has an interesting approach for spreading the word about your book. Upload a chapter or a section from your novel and it will be assigned at random for another member to review. In turn, you will be randomly allocated somebody else’s work to review. Once you have received eight reviews, it enters the chart to be in contention for formal review by publishers and agents representing Orion and Random House (the top 5 get the honour). Continue reading →

Site of the Week: Unbound

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Part of the problem of getting published, once you have got over the correct market hurdle and the quality barrier and passed through the “will it offend anybody?” police, there is one major stumbling block to getting published: will it sell? The publishing world is rife with even the best known books of our time having been rejected with a “yeah, it is good but we don’t think anybody will want to buy this”. There is no need to be downhearted when your precious manuscript collapses here because agents and publishers are only human… they make mistakes.

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Site of the Week: Lulu.com

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And so my collection of site of the week dedicated to getting published begins with the print on demand method. The idea is simple, you upload your book to the site and print as many as you need whether that be for individual sales or contracts with retailers. lulu will store your book and print as many as you require, whenever you require. There is also the option of selling through the lulu marketplace and purchasing a package of services to edit or market your work.
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